south by southwest

Robert Heinecken, “John Szarkowski showing Charles Kuralt how to hold a watermelon when eating it left to right”, 1985 (Image courtesy of the Center for Creative Photography)

Happy Saint Paddy’s Day! The world is still a shitpile.

MoMA’s retrospective of the California-based artist Robert Heinecken should have come sooner, says Christopher Knight. Heinecken’s lack of recognition to this point could have a little something to do with his criticism of MoMA’s powerful photography curator John Szarkowski, and a general New York-centrism. [LA Times]

Holland Cotter reviews Neue Galerie’s “Degenerate Art”, which demonstrates how Hitler used art to demonize the Jews and promote his official agenda. [New York Times]

“At this year’s [South by Southwest] festival, historically a place of artistic idiosyncrasy, music labels were an afterthought and big brands owned the joint.” [New York Times]

Some in Cincinnati are upset about Todd Pavlisko’s piece “Docent”, which required having a sharpshooter shooting inside the Cincinnati Art Museum’s key gallery on a day when the museum was closed. Shareholder Stewart Maxwell complains that the piece shows disrespect to the museum’s most treasured work. [Cincinnati.com, h/t Benjamin Sutton]

In an interview with City Beat, Pavlisko says the piece is a form of institutional critique, which will make visitors think differently about the gallery every time they visit it. The gun has nothing to do with gun violence, but is simply an “art-making tool”. [City Beat]

Ed Ruscha sure picked a safe bet for his upcoming, year-long High Line mural, with “Honey, I Twisted Through More Damn Traffic Today” (though it does describe the feeling of being on the High Line). Marina Galperina has some better suggestions. [ANIMAL]

Syria claims that foreigners, mostly from Turkey, have used the war to systematically loot its artifacts. [TAN]

Speaking of looters: A very thorough and rightly-outraged reminder of why the bluechip art market is a complete distraction from capitalism’s larger and devastating class disparity. “Whenever I see a Rothko I think of Madoff, and how the afterlife of modern art is now yoked to the pissing matches performed by the big swinging SHLONGS of Wall Street,” writes Rhonda Lieberman. She also thinks that the Detroit Institute of Arts spectacle– with the possibility of selling its treasures to pay off creditors– spells a dark future ahead. [The Baffler, h/t @GiovanniGF]

There’s nothing immediately offensive about the premise of Ian Cheney’s new documentary, The City Dark. Living in New York, I can believe that Cheney, an amateur astronomer since his teenage years in Maine, might miss seeing the stars at night, and feel deprived. When he attempts to stretch that wistfulness into an authoritative documentary, however, the results are less than convincing.